The News of Our Lives

The realization hit me in a moment yesterday during our Saturday lunch at our local Grille: it was the 62nd anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination. There had been no mention of this in the newspaper but the memory felt immediate: the shock that someone would shoot the president, immense sorrow when we heard that he had died. I was a freshman at Northwestern then and had just arrived back at the dorm for lunch when my roommate Cheryl turned on her radio and we heard the news about the shooting in Dallas, but with no update on the president's condition. I went to my 1 p.m. English class, but the professor came into the classroom and said "Under the circumstances, I don't think any of us feel like being here right now." And he dismissed the class. A classmate, Vern Haase, asked if I'd like to take a walk along the lakeshore. We walked mostly in silence, sharing our hopes intermittently that all would be well. These hopes were dashed when we approach my dorm. There was a young woman sitting on the front steps, a transister radio to her ear, weeping uncontrollably. "Oh, God, no!" Vern said quietly. I remember that long weekend, crowding into the t.v. room off the lobby of the dorm, watching history unfold: the coffin unloaded from Air Force One and LBJ's brief first address as president, the line of mourners at the capitol, the fatal shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald on live t.v., the heartbreak of seeing John Kenndy, Jr. who had just turned three, saluting his father's coffin as his mother, uncles and world leaders prepared for the sad procession to Arlington. We grappled with the reality of the assassination. How could such a thing happen? Only five years later, when I was completing graduate school at Northwestern, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were tragic but a little less shocking with the feelings of "Oh, no! Not again! Those poor families! What terrible losses!" But we had lost our innocence and ability to be totally shocked in 1963. Only the sorrow remained. Jason, our server at the Grille yesterday, was born in 2003. He heard us talking about November 22, 1963. "Wow!" he said. "You remember it? You were in COLLEGE then?? Tell me about that day! What was it like to see history in real time?" And he listened, amazed to be with people who had memories of such a pivotal time in history. History, of course, is always happening in real time. Sometimes it impacts us through the lens of others. I was born at Wright Patterson Air Force Base where my father was a test pilot shortly before the end of World War II. So I have no direct memories of that war. But it felt very present when I was growing up in a neighborhood built hastily for returning veterans, all of them haunted by the realities of war even as they built new lives in Southern California suburbia. They drank a lot. They smoked cigarettes, one on another. Their parties were raucous. Their depressions were deep. And LIFE magazine brought the realities of that war anew with an ongoing photo history of the world at war. As a child, I was particularly mesmerized by three photos from that era: a crowd of Jewish people being marched out of the Warsaw Ghetto to board a train for Treblinka, among them, at the front of the line, was a little girl as stoic as the adults around her; an Australian POW with curly blond hair and a handsome young face kneeling on the ground, about to be beheaded by a Japanese soldier with a sword held high; two soldiers sitting in the mud of a battleground far from home, one of the soliders is crying, being comforted by his buddy, a letter from home resting in the mud by his side. My first memory of a news event was also the nation's first ever 24 hour news coverage of an unfolding story in 1949. Four-year-old Kathy Fiscus had fallen down an uncapped well near her home in San Marino CA. The cameras and newscaster Stan Chambers were there as rescue workers frantically dug a tunnel beside the very narrow well opening, racing against time to save her life. We had the only t.v. in the neighborhood, so neighbors came to our house with pillows and blankets and prayers for Kathy's safe recovery. When rescuers finally found her, she was dead. It was the first time I ever saw an adult cry. Frightened, I clung to my mother, who held me tightly, as she and the neighbors wept. When I was eight years old, I shed tears of my own when Ethel Rosenberg, along with her husband Julius, was executed for alleged espionage, leaving behind two young children, one of whom was my age. I wondered what it was like for their children and for the mother whose participation in the espionage ring was always in doubt and who was leaving her children to grow up in another family with new names. A year later, I remember being sad about the death of Emilie Dionne, one of the identical Dionne quintuplets, who passed away during an epileptic seizure. LIFE ran a picture of her four identical sisters looking down at her in her coffin. And I wondered what it felt like to be them -- seeing their beloved sister and, in a sense, themselves in that coffin. And then there were the assassinations of the Sixties and the political unrest over Vietnam that impacted our lives as we grew into young adulthood. There were news events as we lived into middle age and beyond -- Watergate, the Challenger, 9/11 -- that were seared into our memories and that shaped our personal and political insights even as the personal notable events of our lives happened. Now in my eighties, I look back on the history of news events intersecting with my own personal history of polio and other serious childhood health issues that kept me out of school intermittently in early elementary school, my joy in dance and acting and writing during the creative days of high school, college and early career, my experiences with love -- both shared and unrequited -- and the warmth and joy of true connection with another. I remember dreaming of independence and a satisfying career as a child and seeing that all come true --not, perhaps, in the way I had dreamed but in the way it needed to happen: my pursuing, then deciding to quit acting, and my life as a journalist not for a daily newspaper but for women's magazines writing features about health and psychology and then writing books in that niche. And getting married in my thirties to Bob, whom I am still with after 50 years, but not having the children I had always imagined I'd have eventually. The many television shows I did, not as an actress but as an author/expert on talk shows. And the unexpected bonus career as a psychotherapist after going back to graduate school in midlife and working full-time at that to this day. This full life happened between all of those headline news stories that live as vividly in my memory as any personal landmarks. Our lives are all punctuated by news events and innovations that change our lives. My maternal grandmother, born in 1890, saw the advent of cars and airplanes, indoor bathrooms and electricity. She weathered the Great Depression as a farm wife, able to feed her family from their garden but making do with scant resources otherwise and she survived the crushing blow of losing her only son in World War II. She lived until 1981, seeing a world changing with technology even as her memories lingered of horses and buggies and pumping water from a well to be heated on a wood stove for Saturday baths. My husband Bob and I look at new technology with wonder -- not just laptops and iPads and cell phones -- but AI devices with which Bob has long conversations about music and physics and philosophy -- and, using telehealth, I treat some patients hundreds of miles away -- even as we remember times before alternate realities, presidential meltdowns and divisions that fracture relationships. And I look at my young niece Maggie, who is sixteen, and nephew Henry, who is 13, and wonder what news events and personal joys and sorrows will shape and define their lives in a future we will never know.